In 1990, a missionary strategist named Luis Bush looked at a map and drew a rectangle. It stretched from West Africa to Japan, bounded by 10° and 40° north latitude. Inside that rectangle lived the vast majority of the world's unreached people — those with the least access to the Christian Gospel on earth. He called it the 10/40 Window. More than three decades later, the window is still open. And it is still overwhelmingly unreached.
The Geography
The 10/40 Window covers a broad swath of the Eastern Hemisphere. Its western edge begins in West Africa — Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Niger — and runs east through North Africa, across the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East, through Central Asia, South Asia, and into East Asia, ending at the Pacific.
The countries within the window include some of the world's most populous: China (1.4 billion), India (1.4 billion), Indonesia (270 million), Bangladesh (170 million), Pakistan (230 million), and Nigeria (220 million). Not every person in every one of these countries is unreached — but within their borders live the majority of the world's unreached people groups.
The window spans six broad geographic zones:
- North Africa — Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan
- The Middle East — Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, UAE, Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey
- Central Asia — Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan
- South Asia — India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka
- Southeast Asia — Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia
- East Asia — China, North Korea, Japan, Mongolia
What "Unreached" Actually Means
The term "unreached" has a specific definition in missiology. A people group is considered unreached when less than 2% of its population is evangelical Christian and there is no indigenous church capable of spreading the Gospel to the rest of the group without outside help.
The threshold is not about whether someone in the group has heard the name of Jesus. It is about whether there is a self-sustaining Christian community within that culture — one that can evangelize, disciple, and plant churches using the group's own language, relationships, and cultural context. Without that, the group will not be reached from within. External missionaries are required.
By that definition, the 10/40 Window contains approximately 7,000 unreached people groups. Most of the world's Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist populations live within the window. So do most of the world's animist peoples, many of whom have never had a Bible translated into their language, let alone a church in their community.
The Scale of the Need
The numbers are staggering and worth sitting with:
- An estimated 3.5 billion people live in the 10/40 Window with little to no access to the Gospel
- 55 of the world's 75 least-evangelized countries are within the window
- 86% of the world's poorest people live within the window — poverty and spiritual lostness are deeply correlated here
- Less than 10% of global missionary resources — personnel, funding, infrastructure — are directed toward 10/40 Window peoples
That last figure is the most sobering. The majority of the world's unreached people live in the 10/40 Window, but less than one-tenth of the Christian world's missionary investment goes there. The rest flows toward countries and people groups that already have substantial evangelical Christian presence — places where the Gospel has already taken root and where additional missionaries are adding to existing work rather than pioneering in its absence.
The disproportion is not a conspiracy. It is partly the result of real barriers: governments that restrict religious activity, cultures where conversion from Islam or Hinduism carries severe social consequences, physical environments that are remote or dangerous. But it is also a question of priority, awareness, and funding. Workers who want to go to the 10/40 Window need support. Missionaries already there need sustained financial backing to stay.
Why This Region, Why Now
Some ask whether the 10/40 Window concept is still useful — whether it is too geographically broad to be actionable or too Western in its framing. These are legitimate questions. The window is not a perfect instrument. There are unreached peoples outside it, and there are reached peoples within it.
But as a orienting framework, it remains valuable precisely because it highlights the concentration of spiritual need in one place. It says: if you care about the people on earth with the least access to the Gospel, look here first. The window is not the whole story. It is the largest and most urgent chapter.
The Global South church is growing rapidly, and many of the missionaries serving the 10/40 Window today come from South Korea, Brazil, Nigeria, India, and other non-Western countries. That shift is significant and encouraging. But the funding gap remains. And the number of unreached people groups with no church, no Bible, and no missionary — that number remains in the thousands.
What Sacred Supply Studio Does About It
Sacred Supply Studio's Sacred Mission™ capsule exists specifically to address the funding gap. 100% of profits from that collection are funded to Within Reach Global, a missionary organization focused on unreached peoples in the 10/40 Window.
The model is straightforward: you buy a garment you would have bought anyway — a premium heavyweight tee, a fleece hoodie, a zip — and the profit from that purchase funds a missionary serving somewhere in the window. Not a percentage. Not "a portion." Everything left after costs goes to the field.
If you want to understand the full math behind that model — the COGS, the funding calculation, the receipts as they're published — the Sacred Mission page has all of it. And if you want to go deeper on the 10/40 Window itself — the geography, the people groups, the specific statistics — our 10/40 Window hub page is built for that.
The window is open. The need is real. And the clothes are the vehicle.